Gospel truths

re: "The Mistakes That Will Haunt Our Legacy" (The New York Times, July 12, 2020)

Mr Kristof's essay reminds us, yet again, that it takes courage to dissent from the majority, a powerful reason that solid legal protection is needed to protect prophets from the reactionary tendencies of conservative majorities, who have a habit of being wrong.

But at least in the US, radical change is possible because brave women and men of all colours can and do speak out against the blindly followed precepts taken as gospel truth, too often literally gospel truth, by the great majority who see themselves as the "good". It is not so long ago that racial segregation was accepted and enforced by unjust law, and many of us are old enough to remember the hate directed with religiously backed law against those of us who dared to love another human person of the same sex.

The way we treat animals, especially the reasons we give for that treatment, can also illuminate. It's not merely, as Mr Kristof points out, that our full on lust for meat produced by inflicting great suffering shows that many humans daily and blatantly contradict the moral code they profess.

It's worse. If your moral code is the sort that holds that only persons deserve moral consideration, perhaps because your moral growth has been stunted by primitive texts that tell a fake story of man (woman?) having dominion over all other living things, then two sets of facts test your conviction: First, some non-human animals seem to quality as persons; second, no human foetus has ever so qualified as a person.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to the New York Times article.

It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/opinion/sunday/animal-rights-cruelty.html#commentsContainer&permid=108091614:108091614